


Loveliness

by tolstayas



Category: Versailles (TV 2015)
Genre: "unnecessarily pretentious" is a valid stylistic choice, F/F, lisetherese, so like........ go read hers its better, this is really the Exact same fic as the one @mcntespan wrote
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-07 07:19:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13429692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/pseuds/tolstayas
Summary: "I have always thought that your Majesty was lovely like a painting. Or the idea of a painting. Your portraits do you no justice.""And you... you are unpaintable. Constantly in motion, a thousand paintings at once. You are lovely like the sun: dawn, dusk, and noontime."for elena@mcntespan! hope you like it ♡





	Loveliness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zanate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zanate/gifts).



Some occasion or another, a banquet, oil and candles, gross extravagance. The Queen stone-faced at the head of the table. Liselotte accepting only a dance or two, in the mood to be amused but tired by the coarse attentions of men, as noble as they may think themselves to be.

 

A glance passes between the two across the table, the faint, ironic shadow of a smile. Liselotte with her elbow on the table, leaning her head on her hand, waiting for Philippe to pester her about her etiquette if only for someone to talk to. Marie-Thérèse with eyelids drooping, hands in her lap, suppressing a yawn.

 

Though Liselotte isn't surprised to see the Queen stand and take her leave, she raises her eyebrows when she sees Marie-Thérèse walk straight towards her.

 

Bending over, a rustling of robes, a whispering in her ear: "I must retire to my chambers. Do join me."

 

Liselotte's face turns six different shades of pink before she manages to stand and stammer her excuses, and follow Marie-Thérèse out of the room.

 

Long hallways, empty, all feasting. Far-off sound of singing.

 

At first, the simple relief of the quiet and the intimate. The Queen rubs her temples, waving her servants off. Liselotte complains.

 

"My thanks, your Majesty, for the rescue," she giggles, a sigh and a laugh. "I couldn't have endured another moment out there."

 

"No need to say such things. You know that the only company I have been wishing for all evening is yours."

 

"Oh -" And Liselotte is flustered again. "How poetic of you. Quite... lovely."

 

She hesitates, then, not knowing how to respond, talking fast, hardly stopping to breathe: "Have you ever tried your hand at composition, your Majesty - beyond some dull scholastic exercise, that is? I've heard women poets are very popular of late. Though I'm afraid to say their subjects of choice aren't always of the most respectable sort..."

 

She stops, but the Queen is still looking at her so, and their eyes meet, and Liselotte flushes red and goes on. "Oh, but there is one I quite like - an Englishwoman, by the name of Aphra Behn. Which, I must say, is not a very English name at all. But she writes very beautiful poems. In English, that is."

 

She takes a breath, slows a little. "You must excuse me - though I do think your Majesty would be a brilliant poetess - I am only talking for something to say, pay me no mind, I don't know what has come over me..."

 

Liselotte puts her hand over her mouth, looks at the ground and looks up again.

 

Marie-Thérèse smiles a little.

 

"You're drunk," she mutters, shaking her head softly.

 

"Aren't you?" Liselotte's voice is a whisper, barely audible.

 

"You know me better than that." Marie-Thérèse almost strict again, empress of marble. "I haven't touched a drop."

 

"That's not what I mean."

 

Marie-Thérèse's brows wrinkling in confusion. Liselotte hesitates for a moment, then smiles, wryly.

 

"Can't you tell? You ―" smiling wider, blushing ― " _You're_ what's got me giddy."

 

She reaches out. Takes the Queen's slender wrist in her hand, holds it to her lips, chin brushing a chain of beads, kisses her where the skin is softest; then holds the hand to her neck.

 

"Can't you feel that?"

 

Marie-Thérèse doesn't ask what she means, doesn't need to. The rush of blood beneath pale skin, a pulse to match her own. "And you call me a poetess?"

 

A pause. The two too close, eyes bright, cheeks flaming. Marie-Thérèse with a hand on Liselotte's neck, thumb against pulsing vein. The choice all hers.

 

The slow brush of fingertips over warm skin, a hand cupping Liselotte's cheek.

 

And when their lips meet it's too sudden, like neither of them could have expected it, both of them knowing how it was done, knowing how it felt but still not quite able to believe in it; so that when it happens they don't know how to keep it, how to hold it there, how to snatch the moment from the flow of time while their two hearts leap in harmony and the air around them becomes charged and thick and hot and bright.

 

They break away almost at once, with a little gasp that doesn't really come from either of them at all, but from the air around them, the room itself changed, the texture of the world pushing them together.

 

The second collision is more careful, more thoughtful, less reckless than the first. Soft. Sweet. Hearts beating as if they'd never been kissed before. Smiling into the kiss, gentle and ephemeral, perfect by impossibility. Lovely because it cannot be so.

 

Eyelashes flutter. Strands of hair are pushed aside and fall, framing faces like haloes in the candlelight.

 

"I must go."

 

"No, stay. Our husbands are still drinking."

 

"It isn't proper."

 

"It's all we have."

 

Silence.

 

"I am so alone here."

 

"I know. We all are."

 

"What woman wouldn't want to be the wife of the King?"

 

"And yet."

 

"Oh, and yet."

 

Long sigh.

 

They change the subject. They talk about art.

 

"I have always thought that your Majesty was lovely like a painting. Or the idea of a painting. Your portraits do you no justice."

 

"You mustn't flatter me."

 

"I am only being truthful."

 

"And you... you are unpaintable. Constantly in motion, a thousand paintings at once. You are lovely like the sun: dawn, dusk, and noontime."

 

"Now it is you who flatters."

 

"But I say it more honestly than I have ever said anything else, my whole life long."

 

The Queen is ardent, sincere. Liselotte shakes her head.

 

"I would never have thought you a liar, but now I am forced to change my mind."

 

"Your Highness does not know, then, what this thing is that we call beauty."

 

"That I do know, and I know it because it is beauty that is in every movement you make."

 

They talk about art; they talk about beauty.

 

They talk about so much else too, but in the end, doesn't it all come down to that? Beauty? The loveliness of it all?

 

Eyes lowered, steam of tea, warmth of togetherness, fingers intertwined.

 

And so the two will become close.

 

And they will talk late into the night.

 

And they will kiss, again, before they part.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a versailles blog [@versaillesbian](https://versaillesbian.tumblr.com/) if anyone's like.... interested


End file.
